Space scientists capture never before seen cosmic spiral

By Dean Murray

Space scientists have captured a never-before-seen cosmic spiral.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a jaw-dropping image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust.

Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell in a system known as Apep, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any.

These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in the system named after the Egyptian serpent god of chaos.

Researchers say the dust-producing stars in Apep are sending out dust at 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second.

Webb’s image, combined with several years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, narrowed d